Charles Amos studied Political Theory at The University of Oxford and writes The Musing Individualist Substack
The Government has announced it wishes to require landlords to acquire planning permission to convert their houses to short-term lets for more than ninety days a year, and that they wish to ban no-fault evictions, ending fixed-term tenancies.
Micheal Gove has defended these interventions by arguing they will ensure local people can carry on buying or renting local homes, and that they will increase the security of tenants. Neither of these justifications is warranted to violate the rights of landlords. Indeed, these restrictions simply legalise theft, and provide the grounds for legalising outright theft too. They must be opposed.
According to the Department for Levelling Up and Housing, requiring planning permission for short-term lets is part of ‘a long-term plan to…ensure local people can continue to live in the place they call home’. Reducing the supply of short-term lets, increasing homes to buy or rent, is assumed to increase the affordability of living locally. But this is irrelevant. Local people have no inherent right to live where they were brought up, let alone at an affordable price.
Imagine a young person brought up in the tiny village of Whitwell wants to buy or rent a house there, but everyone is living in their homes and are not looking to rent or sell. If the Government has the right to “ensure local people can continue to live in the place they call home’ they would have to require homeowners to rent out rooms or sell their homes.
This is unacceptable. It amounts to legalising squatting and outright theft. The moral idea local people have a right ‘to live in the place they call home’ must be rejected and with it, the justification for requiring planning permission for short-term lets.
Mant residents will complain those who occupy short term lets create lots of noise via partying and hassle concerning parking, what some people might call anti-social behaviour. They therefore claim the council has the right to stop them. I sympathise with this position, and, I think residents are right to object to loud parties.
Yet these loud parties are entirely contingent on the type of occupier. Sure, ban loud parties over what residents are ordinarily allowed, but this is not a warrant to stop short-term lets to those who are entirely peaceful. Stopping short-term lets because a minority creates undue noise would be an injustice. It’s like stopping people from buying crisps because a minority litter the packets.
Moreover, stopping the housing supply for rent or purchase from shrinking by stopping several short term lets will stop the natural signalling of the free market. When both locals and tourists wish to live in an area, house prices will rise, increasing the profits of building houses there, and eventually increasing their supply to meet both wants.
By partially stopping the increased demand via increased planning permission, by stopping some short-term lets, these profits do not arise, and, thus, neither does the expansion in the housing supply. As F. A. Hayek writes: ‘Once…rewards correspond not to the value which their services have for their fellows, but to the moral merit or desert the person is deemed to have…they lose their guiding function they have in a market order’.
The ban on no-fault evictions, ending fixed-term tenancies – landlord and tenant agreements to potentially cease the latter’s occupation after a fixed period – is similarly rooted in a dubious right to security of accommodation because it is important to the lives of tenants. Again, this right extends too far.
If I lend my car or coat to someone on the condition I could have it back in six months, and, when I did ask for it back after six months, was refused, this would be a simple case of theft (even if it asking for it back inconveniences them). The fact the borrower may pay some amount to the lender in the meantime is irrelevant; it remains theft.
Analogously, tenants occupying a landlord’s house when he wishes to retake possession of it when a fixed term lease comes to an end are committing theft just as much, and, even if the state legalises this, it remains wrong. To be clear: No one is defending landlords kicking tenants out of their homes within the fixed leasing period (unless they are at fault, such as by not paying rent).
Socialists may maintain full property rights cannot extend to areas that significantly affect peoples lives. Thus, full property rights cannot extend to housing either, which permits room for the ban on no-fault evictions (for the landlord is not deprived of his rights).
This is implausible. If you can fully own your home, and, leave it empty, burn it down, or turn it into a garden as you may wish, benefiting no one, why, by the same reasoning, cannot a landlord rent out his home at will, benefiting tenants just a bit? Socialists may counter landlords aren’t renting out their own homes.
This is often true. Yet, as Robert Nozick has maintained, if they have bought them off homeowners with full rights, surely, they acquire those full rights too, and, hence, can evict people when a tenancy agreement ends.
Disregarding concerns about individual rights has the potential to backfire too. Since Section 21 notices, the legal mechanism of no-fault evictions, reduces the legal cost involved in evicting troublesome tenants, the alternative being a Section 8 notice requiring proof of a breach of the lease, banning them increases the cost of letting to troublesome tenants, such as students.
Landlords on the margin of renting will remove themselves from the market which will contract the housing supply to them and thus increase rent. As such the very tenants the Government wishes to help will be either priced out of renting or have to pay a higher rent for a small increase in security of tenure (which could have been freely achieved by entering longer leases anyway).
In sum, the ban on no-fault evictions legalises theft, and the requirement to acquire planning permission for short-term lets is predicated on a dubious right to live in your local area, which, taken to its endpoint, would permit the outright theft of homes from their owners too.
A liberal society that respects private property must oppose these wretched restrictions with the utmost force. Only then will it truly respect the sanctity of each owner himself.
The post Charles Amos: Gove’s restrictions on landlords legalise theft. Opposing them is a moral necessity. appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Charles Amos
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